Sara moved towards the center, with the mud sucking at her ankle high boots and threatening to dislodge the left one from her foot and swallow it.
Apparently, she hadn’t laced it as tightly as its counterpart, and with every step she could feel it slide down her ankle as the muck gripped it.
Her eyes darted left and right, while she looked back often to see if the tall man and the woman had followed her.
When she spotted movement to her right, she smiled, for although she couldn’t see the man’s face from where she was, she could see the wet dark hair and the hood hanging down his back.
Tanner!
Sara raised her gun, took careful aim, but hesitated.
What is he doing? Is he talking to someone?
Her hesitation ended when his head turned and she could see his face in profile. It was Tanner and although the shot was far from an easy one, she knew she could make it. Sara took careful aim at the center of Tanner’s back, and after releasing a breath, she fired.
***
Tyler had found his gun without difficulty, but had trouble collecting his bullets.
Despite both he and Sherry scouring the area, he was only able to find four of the six that had dropped, and the rest of his ammo was back at the house, inside the stolen minivan.
Tyler knew if they delayed any longer that the man and woman who killed his brother might get away.
And so, they traveled across the field, entered the forest and moved in a straight line while keeping watch, but after trudging some distance with no sign of either Sara or Tanner, Sherry believed they had lost them.
“We should go back to that farmhouse. The bastard probably got away, plus, we left the money back there.”
Tyler glared at her.
“Do you remember what else we left back there, Sherry? We left my damn brother, my dead brother that this bastard killed. You go back if you want, but I’m not doing anything else in this world until I find this son of a bitch and make him suffer.”
Sherry stared at him, and then shrugged.
“The guy’s gone. He could be anywhere by now.”
A shot rang out, the sound coming from up ahead and to the right.
Tyler pushed past Sherry and headed towards the sound.
“I got the bastard now.”
Sherry sighed, turned, and followed Tyler, as the frown lines on her face deepened and her patience grew thin.
CHAPTER 7 - Ryder on the storm
Amy and Dean entered her house and found her mother either passed out or sleeping on the living room sofa.
There was an old movie on the TV and liquor bottles scattered atop the coffee table.
Amy’s mom, Carol Patton, was an alcoholic and a pain pill addict. Her habits were sustained by a substantial quarterly check she received in compensation for losing her right leg below the knee, and the use of one eye, in a work-related accident.
After legal wrangling, Carol Patton’s attorney agreed that his client would accept a structured settlement with periodic payments rather than go to trial, where she undoubtedly would have been awarded a huge lump sum by a jury. The payments Amy’s mom received for her suffering added up to well over six figures a year.
When she wasn’t drunk or high, Amy’s mom would take the bus trip to the casino with her friends and lose hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.
Before the accident, she was a hardworking single mom, but after becoming hooked on pain pills and caught in the downward spiral of alcoholism, Carol Patton rarely saw her daughter. She had no interest in Amy’s life and didn’t even know Dean’s name, despite the fact that he and Amy had been dating for two years and had been classmates even longer.
Amy locked her bedroom door and then she and Dean poured the money atop her mattress. Once the bags were empty and the cash heaped in a pile, the two teens just stared at it in awe.
Amy gave a little laugh.
“Oh my God, there might be a million there.”
“They must have robbed a bank,” Dean said. “Who else would have this kind of money?”
Amy went to her closet and came back to the bed holding a backpack.
“After we count it, we’ll put it in here and then we’ll get rid of these bags.”
“And the phone too,”
“Why did you take the phone?”
“I figured it belonged to one of them and if the cops find it with the bags, they’ll know who to arrest for the robbery.”
“Smart, yeah, they shouldn’t get away with it.”
“What about us? I guess we’re thieves now too.”
“No, what we did is more like finders keepers.”
Dean laughed, then, he picked up the bags the money had been in. They were made of a sturdy canvas material and had a drawstring at the top.
“This doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense?”
“These bags, they’re coin bags, you know, for rolled coins, dimes, quarters, but look how big they are. If these were filled even halfway with rolls of quarters they’d be too heavy to carry, plus the weight would probably split the bag.”
Amy took one of the bags from him.
“Yeah, so I guess they used this as sort of a prop or something when they stole the money.”
Dean nodded in agreement, as forty miles away, the police and the FBI were coming to the same conclusion.
***
FBI agent Mel Cooper stared down at the body of Michael Ryder and wondered why the young blond man had been killed, when it was obvious that he had been no threat to the robbers.
As if he were reading his mind, his fellow agent, Ben Simms, answered the question.
Simms was in his forties, same as Cooper, but his thick wavy hair and boyish face made him appear to be years younger.
“Witnesses say the woman didn’t like the way he was looking at her. The bitch shot him as they were leaving, just plain mean.”
“And stupid,” Cooper said, while scratching the center of his bald head. “This murder makes them job one, and what about the other site, the one where they dumped the vehicle?”
“We have a witness and a description of the vehicle they drove away in after dumping the phony armored car, plus, there’s little doubt that there was a driver too.”
Cooper stared down at the body of Michael Ryder.
“We have to get these bastards, Ben, and I mean today.”
***
Not far away, Cameron Ryder left her blue pickup truck, an old Chevy C/K 1500. She had spotted a cop she knew named Bobby, he was manning the perimeter of the scene and she went over to talk to him.
Cameron was a tall woman in her late-thirties, long-limbed and shapely, with a no-nonsense look about her. She had once been a cop, but was now a bounty hunter, and she wanted to find the people who had robbed the bank more than she wanted to breathe.
Past the yellow Crime Scene tape that cordoned off the area was a panel truck that resembled an armored car, but a close look revealed that it was only made to appear as such. Someone had set the interior of the truck on fire, but the fire never spread to the exterior because of the rain.
The cop was about to tell her to step back when he recognized her.
“Cameron, hi, how do you like this weather, huh?”
Cameron pointed at the panel truck.
“They used that, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, but do you know something about the robbers? Are they people you were tracking down?”
Cameron pushed a strand of her blond hair back behind her ear and began crying, but her tears were hardly noticeable due to the rain, still, the cop saw something in her eyes and felt the sorrow emanating off her, as well as the anger.
“Cameron, hey, honey what’s wrong?”
“The bastards killed Michael, Bobby. They murdered my brother.”
“The civilian that got killed? That was Mike?”
The cop, Bobby, had been both a friend and a classmate to Cameron’s younger brother, Mic
hael Ryder, and had gone through high school with him. After the shock of the news hit him, he too grew angry.
“Cameron, this is all I know and it’s not much. A man and a woman robbed the bank by pretending to be guards delivering coins. The man was normal looking, maybe on the tall side, while the woman was shapely, and they both had dark hair. They used this truck to help make them look legit and there’s a possibility of a third person, maybe a driver, but they can’t be sure. A witness here says he saw a silver Toyota minivan leaving the scene and headed north and... that’s all I know.”
Cameron reached across the tape and laid a hand atop the cop’s shoulder.
“Thank you, Bobby.”
Cameron had taken three steps, but she turned back to ask a question.
“Which one shot my brother?”
“It was the woman. Witnesses say she did it because she didn’t like the way he was staring at her.”
“Knowing Michael, he was probably trying to memorize their faces.”
“You’re going after them, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,”
“Be careful, I know you can handle yourself, honey, and I know your record at tracking down dirt bags, but if and when you find them, please be careful, and one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
The cop looked around before speaking.
“Kill them, and if you find you can’t do it, call me.”
Cameron stared into her friend’s eyes.
“You won’t be getting that call.”
A minute later, she was back in her pickup truck and headed north.
CHAPTER 8 - ... but you can’t hide
Tanner put away his knife and looked at his new companion.
It was the dog, Madison’s dog, as he had come to think of her. She was a mutt with a lot of German shepherd mixed in, but Tanner noticed something else about her.
“You’re almost dry. How have you been staying dry?”
The dog took off back the way it had come and Tanner moved to follow her, just in time to avoid Sara’s shot.
The blast from the gun frightened the hound and she doubled her pace. Tanner followed, his speed no match for the dog’s, but he stayed with her long enough to see her dart left and move beneath the branches of a bush.
Beyond the foliage, the north end of the clearing was visible, and just past the center of it and moving his way was Sara Blake.
Tanner turned, sprinted six steps, and dropped to the ground.
Once he was out of Sara’s line of sight, he pivoted and crawled over to the bush that the dog had disappeared beneath.
As soon as he moved under the bush, he felt himself sliding downward into darkness atop something that felt like a ladder, but was actually an old set of steep wooden stairs.
The ground at the base of the steps was covered in dirt and debris blown in from outside, and as Tanner hit bottom, the pile of leaves and broken branches made for a soft landing. When he rolled over, his hand touched a shelf and he heard the tinkle of glass jars.
Tanner reached beneath the hoodie and grabbed his phone off his belt. The device’s case was as wet as the rest of him, but when he activated the phone, it lit up, and he could see that he was underground and surrounded by brick walls.
However, there was pine shelving, some of it still standing, and upon it were rows of sealed glass jars. It was then that Tanner realized that he was in what had been the farm’s root cellar. It had likely been in a location near the house, perhaps beneath the plot of land where the barn had been.
With the phone off, his eyes adjusted to the gloom, and just enough gray light filtered in to make out shapes.
Whimpering sounds came from his left, and the sparse light revealed the dog lying across from him. She was shivering from fear.
The animal had never been trusting of humans, not even Madison, who would leave food for her.
Tanner stayed still and hoped the dog would realize that he wasn’t a threat, but the whimpering continued.
Someone moved near the bush and the hole above darkened to near blackness. When that someone spoke, Tanner was not surprised by the identity of its owner.
“I know that you’re hiding nearby, Tanner, and I also know you’re unarmed.”
Light returned as Sara moved about, but the hole grew dark once more as she returned and spoke in a soft voice, as if to herself.
“What was that noise?”
It was the dog, whose whimpering had grown sharper in pitch.
Self-preservation made Tanner consider killing the hound, but the act would likely only create more noise, and in a way, the dog had already saved his life. To Tanner, that meant something, man or beast.
He took out his knife, his only weapon, and prepared to defend himself as best he could, which would likely fall far short.
He was in a hole with his back against the wall, while the enemy had a superior weapon and higher ground. Once Sara discovered him, he would become the proverbial fish in a barrel, and she would take pure delight in shooting him.
The scant light increased as a hand moved aside the branches of the bush, and then Sara’s face appeared, followed by the barrel of the gun.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, but once they had, she smiled.
“There you are.”
CHAPTER 9 - Checkmate!
At the town’s jail and only police station, Chief of Police Matt McCoy lowered the flask beneath his desk, just as the door opened and his deputy, Lydia Bradshire, stepped in and shook off the rain.
The department only had three other employees. One was an elderly clerk home with the flu, the second, a rookie male deputy whose wife just had a baby, and the third, a retired cop in his fifties from Philadelphia, who responded to calls on nights and weekends.
Ridge Creek was a quiet town of just over four-thousand residents, but due to the farmland within its borders, the town had size. Still, not much ever happened in Ridge Creek, a condition that would change drastically on this rain-soaked day.
Chief McCoy was fifty-four and had been a cop in the town since age twenty. He was a big man who appeared intimidating in his beige uniform and silver badge, but he had talked his way out of trouble more than he’d ever used his fists, and not once had he fired his weapon while on duty.
Lydia Bradshire had been a crossing guard for the elementary school before joining the army, but when she returned to town three years ago as a veteran who had served in a combat zone, she was hired to be a deputy.
Lydia was thirty, five-foot-eight and blond. Her mannish uniform hid the fact that her figure was above average, but one look into her eyes told you that there was a mind working behind the ice-blue orbs, and in truth, she ran the department.
McCoy had been a good chief until his wife’s death, six months earlier. Since then, the ex-alcoholic had slipped off the wagon on a regular basis, and seemed just to be putting in time until he could retire at fifty-five.
Lydia checked the station’s computer for messages and found something interesting.
“We may have trouble coming, Matt. A man and a woman robbed the bank in Ciderville and got away with nearly a million in cash, all unmarked.”
McCoy’s face screwed up in confusion.
“Why would that little bank have so much cash on hand?”
“It was for their distribution center in Philly, but they park cash there sometimes in order to save the armored car from making a trip into the city.”
“Penny-wise and pound-foolish,” McCoy said. “Was anybody hurt?”
“Yeah, a civilian named Michael Ryder was killed, and when last seen, the thieves were headed towards us.”
“They wouldn’t come here. More than likely they’re headed for Philly.”
“That’s for sure,” Lydia said, as the lights flickered.
The chief stood and grabbed his raincoat.
“That’s the power house, the damn roof has a leak and I’ve told the mayor more than once that it needed fixing. I’ll g
o check on it, but do me a favor and have Dave Robards meet me there, he’s our utility guy.”
“Alright and be careful out there, trees are down all over the place.”
“Will do,” McCoy said, and as soon as he reached his cruiser and knew no one was looking, he brought the flask out again.
***
Sara had less than a second to realize that Tanner wasn’t alone in the hole, before the dog scampered up the steep incline and pushed past her.
“Hey!”
No sooner had the dog sped by, when Tanner’s knife embedded its tip into the meat of Sara’s forearm and between the shock of the blade and surprise at the dog, Sara found herself falling backwards onto her ass and dropping her gun.
Tanner had thrown the knife at her throat, but when she instinctively raised her hand to ward off a perceived attack by the dog, she had blocked the blade’s path.
Tanner moved up the steep stairs, while Sara was still wincing from the impact and pain of the knife, and he grabbed her left ankle, just above the top of her boot.
When Sara realized what he was doing, she reached out for her weapon, but it had fallen beneath another bush and was out of reach, then, she was yanked down into the hole.
After the shock of impact, Sara felt Tanner’s hands close around her throat, and then heard Sherry’s voice.
“She was right here. Where the hell did she go?”
“It was that damn dog that ran past us; that’s what you saw,” Tyler said.
Down in the hole, both Tanner and Sara froze, while locked together like lovers, with their faces just inches apart and his hands still gripping her throat.
If he killed her now, the noise it would make would alert the couple outside, and if she called to them for help, she would receive it, but only to have it followed by a bullet.
Sara stared into Tanner’s eyes, then, at the entrance to the hole, back and forth, back and forth, while Tanner did the same.
“And I’m telling you that I didn’t see the dog, Tyler. I saw her, so watch your ass and help me check the area, because I’m telling you, she’s here somewhere.”
The TANNER Series - Books 4-6 (Tanner Box Set Book 2) Page 3